Asshole or Asperger's?

Since we are talking about me, may we assume the second option, that my countless and varied episodes of assholery can reasonably be blamed on the neurological aberration known as Asperger's Syndrome? A comparatively mild condition on the autism spectrum that nonetheless can wreak havoc in a person's life? May we? If so, we can go ahead and slip on the 4-D glasses and settle in for a glimpse of my long, strange, angst-drenched (I'll try not to get any on you) trip. But if you can't--and I'm speaking directly to you, you there with the cynical smirk!—if you are unable to give me the benefit of any plausibly allowable doubt here as a guest on my blog, well then dammit you can buzz the fuck off. Go read another James Patterson novel!

Those of you still with me, in particular those of my acquaintances who have witnessed or experienced examples of my socially inappropriate behavior, please understand I am not trying to escape responsibility for the injuries and embarrassments I have caused. I'm not looking to excuse what I've done. My hope is to ease the sting of presumed intent by identifying the underlying reflexes that prompt many of my boorish actions. Virtually all perceptions of premeditation with these blunders are illusory. The blunders spring to life instantaneously. They're intuitive, born of a fallible reading of nuance. Self-protection for an Aspergian is tricky, risky business. The occasions when I've lost my temper with people, or treated them meanly, have haunted me from as far back as I can remember. My memory's nowhere near as comprehensive as the typical Aspergian's, but those of times I've unnecessarily hurt people are the ones that always seem to stick.

My self-diagnosis of what I've come to believe is Asperger's began while reading John Elder Robison's memoir, Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger's, This book not only opened my eyes (figuratively, ha ha) it emboldened me to shed a little light on my own personality dysfunctions. I want to be forgivable, of course, even liked, if not loved, else I might never have recognized in myself some of the symptoms Robison describes so intimately. His suffering was exponentially greater than mine. Then, too, his brilliance in overcoming the paralysis of believing himself an inexplicable outcast compares in little measure with my stubborn trudging through the passive daydreaming my obsessively critical lawyer father constantly paired with “feeble-mindedness.” I'd fixed my bearing on an idea of normalcy, to escape the neurotic tangle of physical tics, asthma, skin rashes, self-reproach and thoughts of suicide to an existence that promised happiness.

Mine and Robison's trouble understanding and communicating with people pushed us along divergent paths. He found solace in inanimate objects, machines in particular awakened his self-confidence: “No matter how big the machine, I am in charge. Machines don’t talk back. They are predictable. They don’t trick me, and they’re never mean.” My path went inward, my “feeble-minded” daydreaming leading me ultimately to the magic of words. The lawyer could follow me there only by proxy. He'd embedded reflexes in me that foretold spyware, yet my stubbornness, bequeathed unwittingly by him in his Norwegian genes, proved an effective enough firewall to preserve at least a fig-leaf sense of privacy.

I also turned to inanimate objects, but my curiosity focused on fantasy rather than mechanics. Even something humble as a rock was alive to me, with feelings I worried about hurting. I think my mother encouraged this. This inclination has stayed with me, albeit my emotional attachment is less empathic. Now, I see things mostly in the role of scapegoat--the laptop gets cursed when my fingers hit the wrong key, the hammer hears shouted obscenities when it hits my thumb while I'm trying to hang a picture, the picture hissed at when it refuses to hang straight. I know this is not sane, but it's safer taking anger out on things than on people. And I do sometimes apologize to the things after I've calmed down. But only when we're alone.

Robison's discovery that his mind worked rapidly understanding complex problems and that he had an exceptionally detailed memory opened up a new life for him. These unusual traits converged with his mechanical savvy and an unusual capacity for patience to launch electronics as the vehicle that gave him a ride he'd not dreamed possible. After dropping out of high school, he became so inventive designing lighting and audio circuitry on his kitchen table for local nightclubs the rock band KISS learned of his skills and paid him to trick out some electric guitars with special effects. The group soon made him its special effects expert. In turn the Aspergian whiz kid made KISS famous for its spectacular live performances.

With dutiful effort Robison made gradual progress learning social cues and mastering the “illogical” small talk that enabled him to feel more comfortable in social settings. Same with me, although my deficit in this area was nowhere near as severe. This could be because my mind works much slower than Robison's, more cautiously. Not all Aspergians are alike. Our traits can vary widely. After reading Robison's memoir I sought out more information on Asperger's, to help me better understand the syndrome and to help me with my own diagnosis. This is from Adult Asperger's Syndrome: The Essential Guide, by Kenneth Roberson, Ph.D.: 

 The complexity of Asperger’s can be distilled down to one main idea – trouble understanding what goes on in other people’s minds.

So far, so good. In another section, Roberson explains the way many if not most Aspergians cope with this shortcoming:

The neurological vulnerabilities of someone with Asperger’s make them especially sensitive to ambiguity and unpredictability, which are typically overwhelming. Their counter-reaction is to seek orderliness, certainty and uniformity. To do that they focus on facts in the present moment, they take ideas and words exactly at their most usual and basic sense, and they avoid figurative or metaphorical thinking. The world of Asperger’s is an orderly one. Facts, rather than presumptions, are a priority. Doubt, uncertainty, and vagueness are avoided. Literal speech, focusing on things exactly as they are while leaving out figurative explanations and assumptions, is a hallmark of Asperger’s.

For me, while the distillate's the same, my coping, by contrast, is primarily subterranean. I'd learned to hide in my imagination, so it was natural for me to begin exploring there when I felt bold enough to venture outward. This led to my working out above-ground difficulties without the pressure of someone looking over my shoulder. Books, newspapers and other reading matter, along with stumbles, missteps and serious blunders comprised the resources I worked with in my secret little chamber. I went above ground to test hypotheses on real people, which gained me incrementally the successes that kept me going. My test method was to represent my findings in words, both oral and written. I taught myself basic wordcraft this way. Writing has been my life raft over the years—a four-decade career in newspapers, which fed my Social Security account. These days I blog and write fiction to preserve my illusion of sanity.

I nearly forgot to mention another neurological aberration that has complicated things. A psychiatrist diagnosed this one: Attention Deficit Disorder. It was a late diagnosis that identified a layer of difficulty over those of my as-yet undiagnosed Asperger's. All the more incentive to dive to my private place, where ideas whirl and dance before me with less risk of interruption by superficial stimuli. Yet danger is not completely absent there. Plenty of bad memories sleep below in the dark, and many can be awakened by resonances from above. My little hideout in one sense sits on a dormant volcano of bad juju. It's my good fortune to have a mojo, besides my writing, that is fairly effective in keeping the bad stuff at bay: certain musical strains. Two come to mind at the moment.

One is a certain section in The Nutcracker Suite. I don't know what it means, how it relates to the story, or even which of the eight numbers it's in or where it is in the number. It's only a few bars. I know only that whenever I hear it I start to cry. It's a purely emotional response to an unexpected triumphal-sounding advent of brass that follows a stretch of tones that seems to suggest hardship or trial. I've surmised that somehow this moving tonal progression taps deep into my subconscious with a healing touch on some long ago forgotten hurt.

Here's another that does the same thing for me. It's from the 1968 Broadway musical Hair, and it's called “The Flesh Failures.” The lyrics start out grim:

We starve, look at one another short of breath,
Walking proudly in our winter coats,
Wearing smells from laboratories,
Facing a dying nation of moving paper fantasy,
Listening for the new told lies with supreme visions of
Lonely tunes.
Somewhere, inside something, there is a rush of
Greatness.
Who knows what stands in front of our lives;
I fashion my future on films in space.
Silence tells me secretly everything, everything...

At the end comes the chorus, bringing the healing tears. It consists of a single phrase, repeated over and over, like a mantra: Let the Sunshine In.

1776 – David McCullough

To avoid being sternly censured or even prosecuted for trying to practice psychology without credentials I shall limit testimony to my own experience as therapist/patient. The diagnosis: acute non-hip funk, i. e. terror of being discovered at any moment by credible authorities of being an incompetent fraud hopelessly unfit to measure up to the performance standards expected of me by others and myself. It’s the kind of funk where I’m apt to slap myself in the face real hard, I mean REAL HARD!!!, welt-raising hard, again and again in the hope I’m only dreaming and can slap myself awake. Of course, being in the throes of expectant imminent discovery of my incompetence, a state in which I’ve come to believe at my deepest innerness that my self-doubt extends to my competence to slap myself hard enough to awaken from the nightmare funk, I don’t bother to eye the palm of my slapping hand. I sigh a desperate rasping torrent of anxiety-wreaking oxygen-depleted breath and roll the eyes of my inner patient up to those of my inner therapist.

You’re in trouble, Bunky, the therapist thinks, and prescribes David McCullough’s incisive look at 1776, the most critical year in our country’s history to date. Don’t call me “Bunky”, the one inner self says, silently, to the other, and agrees to look at the book I picked up for half a buck at the public library’s fall used-book sale and put off reading for fear it was full of obscure names, dates and geography, etc.--in a word, dull.

Long story short, 1776 is full of obscure names, dates and geography, etc. What it’s not is dull. And it cured my funked-up self of its funk and made it want to crow like a rooster.

In all but one instance 1776 focuses on men. The exception is a brief mention of Molly Corbin, who went into the disastrous battle for Fort Washington at her husband’s side. When he was killed she stepped up to the cannon he’d been loading and firing, and continued “manning” the gun until she was wounded so severely she nearly lost an arm. After the Americans surrendered, the British allowed her to return home to Pennsylvania.

The Fort Washington fiasco was one of a series of ignominious defeats suffered by the Continental Army, with much of the blame rightfully placed on the commander in chief. Disease, lack of supplies including clothing and gunpowder, lack of training, desertions in droves, and failure to re-up when annual enlistments expired continually dragged down morale. Bad battlefield decisions came near providing the camel’s back-breaking straw, especially when sheer fortune, such as weather or unexpected decisions by the British, played against the Colonials as well. Confidence in Gen. Washington eroded steadily until, following the surrender of Fort Washington Nov. 16, his most trusted assistant, Joseph Reed, in utter desperation, sent a confidential letter to Charles Lee, Washington’s chief rival for command of the Army, expressing concern that his boss was faltering:

Oh! General, an indecisive mind is one of the greatest misfortunes that can befall an army. How often have I lamented it this campaign. All circumstances considered, we are in a very awful and alarming situation—one that requires the utmost wisdom and firmness of mind. As soon as the season will admit, I think yourself and some others should go to Congress and form the plan of the new army.

Washington’s reaction when he inadvertently read Lee’s response to Reed gives some insight into the character of the man we one day would honor with his face on the dollar bill. Knowing now he’d lost the confidence of Lee, his second-in-command, and Reed, his most trusted aide, he resealed the letter and sent it off to Reed with a note acknowledging he’d read it by mistake, but saying nothing more. Lee’s note to Reed had concurred with the latter’s view “that fatal indecision of mind...in war is a much greater disqualification than stupidity or even want of personal courage. Accident may put a decisive blunder in the right, but eternal defeat and miscarriage must attend the men of the best parts if cursed with indecision.” Washington later told Reed he was hurt not because he disagreed with the accusations but because Reed had gone behind his back. McCullough says Washington possibly agreed the battlefield blunders were his fault.

Washington had at least one staunch supporter in Congress, Delegate William Hooper of North Carolina, a signer of the Declaration of Independence. “Oh, how I feel for Washington, that best of men,” he wrote. “The difficulties which he has now to encounter are beyond the power of language to describe, but to be unfortunate is to be wrong and there are men...who are villains enough to brand him. There are some long faces here.”

Washington refused to show outwardly how discouraged he felt. In a letter to his cousin, who managed his home at Mount Vernon, he wrote that was “wearied to death” with troubles, mentioning among them how few troops he had left in the Army. “In confidence I tell you that I never was in such an unhappy, divided state since I was born.” All the while “within a stone’s throw” of the enemy.

David McCullough doing it the old-fashioned way

Right here is where we get a glimpse of the trait in Washington’s personality that might have been most critical in keeping the Army going, albeit at its lowest strength of only a couple thousand men. It was the trait we call today “compartmentalization” (at least I think that’s what it’s called). It’s the ability to keep various issues and priorities separate from each other so that a person can focus on one at a time without distraction from any of the others, so that worries can be kept in their own compartment and not interfere with or override everything else in the mind. Here’s the glimpse of Washington’s compartmentalization--in the same letter to his cousin, an instant shift from the woe-is-me lament, he discusses his concern about fireplaces at Mount Vernon:

“That in the parlor must, I should think, stand as it does; not so much on account of the wainscotting, which I think must be altered (on account of the door leading into the new building), as on account of the chimney piece and the manner of its fronting into the room...” Are we getting the drift here? This is The Father or His Country bringing about the birth of the United States of America. We know this story has a happy ending for many of us. Was Washington afflicted with what we know today as Attention Deficit Disorder, and if so had he learned to manage it to his—and ultimately our—advantage? Is there something of value here for all of us modern ADDers?

I am feeling verklempt at the moment. You may wish to discuss the idea amongst yourselves.

[for more Friday's Forgotten Books check the links on Patti Abbott's unforgettable blog]